Life is Meals

Synopsis

From the award-winning author James Salter and his wife, Kay - amateur chefs and terrific hosts - here is a lively, beautifully illustrated food lover's companion.

With an entry for each day of the year, Life Is Meals takes us from a Twelfth Night cake in January to a champagne dinner on New Year's Eve. This is a book rich with culinary wisdom, history, recipes, literary pleasures, and the authors' own stories of their triumphs - and catastrophes - in the kitchen.

Entries include:The menu on the Titanic on the fatal night The seductiveness of a velvety Brie or the perfect martini How to decide whom to invite to a dinner party - and whom not to The greatest dinner ever given at the White House Where in Paris Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter had French onion soup at 4:00 a.m. How to cope with acts of god and man-made disasters in the kitchen

Sophisticated, practical, opinionated and indispensable, Life Is Meals is a tribute to the glory of food and drink, and the joy of sharing them with others.

A delicious grab-bag of stories, recollections and histories that makes for the perfect gift for literary foodies

Stuart Evers - Independent

The breadth and scope of the entries, from personal anecdote to Classical history, from modern American manners to French peasant cookery, is admirable, as are the beautiful illustrations and whip-smart design